Previous research has consistently found that men and women have similar levels of happiness, life satisfaction, and other global measures of subjective well-being. This article demonstrates that significant gender-related differences in subjective well-being exist–but tend to be concealed by an interaction effect between age, gender and well-being. Women under 45 tend to be happier than men; but older women are less happy. Thus, in a pooled sample of 146,000 respondents from 65 societies, among the youngest group, 24 percent of the men and 28 percent of the women describe themselves as very happy; but among the oldest group, only 20 percent of the women describe themselves as very happy, while 25 percent of the men do so. The relationship between gender and well-being reverses itself moving from a female advantage of 4 points to a deficit of 5 points.
